In a large corporate enterprise, management and operations information may be spread across multiple unrelated computer systems. It may be information from different computer programs (hereinafter referred to as applications)—for example, an operations control application supplying production or service delivery information and an accounting application supplying cost information—is needed to assess the performance of the enterprise at a high level. The information may be useful in calculating costs as a function of the level of performance rather than just the cost of operating. These and other calculations may be valuable to managers and executives making business decisions for the enterprise. But if the different applications are incompatible one with another this information may not be available or may not be available in a timely fashion or may not be available in a cost effective manner.
The enterprise may have two or more different mainframe computer systems, several UNIX computer systems, and many desktop computer systems which support different enterprise business applications. The different mainframe computer systems may be located at different physical locations and may be under the control of different units of the company. Each computer system may itself comprise a complex of applications, data, and databases. Some of the applications may be developed by the enterprise, while other applications may be developed by third parties. Some applications and systems may be very old.
The interface which may be used to extract information or data from one application may not work for any other application. The data format produced by one application may not be compatible with the data format produced by any other application. Attempting to communicate among different computer systems poses additional problems. The different operating systems on different computer systems may not support common communication mechanisms. For example, a UNIX computer system may support socket communications between independent machines while the mainframe computer system may not support socket communications.
To verify the successful progress of a large application, enterprise personnel may access data in files with a text editor and cut-and-paste this information directly into a commercial spreadsheet application in order to perform calculations on the progress of the application. This is a laborious and error prone process. If the process only fails 1% of the time—perhaps once every three months—this manual approach may be considered inefficient.
When an enterprise depends upon its deployed resources to support its production it may be desirable to be able to predict when growth will exhaust the deployed resources so additional resources can be deployed before growth is stalled.